The Tortoise Moves (But Not Very Much)
by Nomad1
Summary: Even the most strong-minded of witches would hesitate to wear a Borrowed body for too long, lest their way of thinking be permanently changed by the new perspective. But of course, gods are different.


**Notes**: Written for the_heart_asks for Yuletide 2019.

**The Tortoise Moves (But Not Very Much)**

In the mountains of the Ramtops, the witches learn the art of Borrowing, riding animal minds to know the world as glimpsed through their senses. But such magic is not without its risks: a different perspective invites different thoughts, and even the most strong-minded of witches would hesitate to wear a Borrowed body for too long, lest they forget how to think like humans.

Of course, that's witches. Gods are different.

They're much more susceptible to being reshaped by prevailing patterns of thought, for a start.

* * *

Small gods feed like parasites, contorting themselves to portray any lure, binding themselves ever deeper and tighter until they can grow what they've captured into something self-sustaining. Great gods feed like fires, blazing hot enough to forge all manner of mighty works, but forced to ever consume, and liable to die unfed at what was once the heart.

Tortoises, on the other hand, feed slowly and methodically. There's a limit to how much seduction or intimidation you really need to stop a lettuce from getting away.

* * *

"I told you that Library would be nothing but trouble," the Great God Om declared.

These days he was capable of manifesting in any form that he wished, so the fact that he'd currently taken the shape of a small one-eyed tortoise was pure coincidence. It was well-known that the Cenobiarch had a habit of wandering off to work in the Citadel's many walled gardens, driving his subordinates to near tears of despair at this blow to the natural order of them looking down on such things, and this happened to be the handiest of the shapes in Om's iconography for the setting.

Besides, fruit always tasted better eaten in tortoise form than it did overflowing from a cornucopia of plenty in Dunmanifestin. Gods were good at producing the flavour of food grown in eternal sunlight, but they'd never quite got the hang of proper honest dirt.

"The place is infested with philosophy," he went on, after pausing to determinedly chew his way through a melon rind. "People going around questioning ideas all the time. Now you've got schisms! Do you know how embarrassing it is to go to manifest and find that you're half bull and half pillar of flame? I was lucky I managed to pass that one off as The Miracle of the Well-Done Steak."

"I think a little bit of uncertainty does people good," Brutha said. He set down his hoe to rest, slightly out of breath. Age had made him scrawny and increasingly bald, but he still moved with a kind of plodding determination that got things done, if not efficiently.

"People, not gods," Om grumbled. There was nothing the gods of the Disc abhorred more than a wishy-washy worshipper, apart from being asked to read long documents with lots of difficult words. "It's bad enough that you let other priests in here. What's this about the Atheist Society setting up in the Library?"

"We have the biggest collection of religious books in the world these days. I think they've come to reject them all in person," Brutha said. "Anyway, Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah says it's good for the local economy. Urn can't make the copper helmets fast enough." He reached into his robes and pulled out a sheaf of papers. "And then there's these."

Om craned his neck to look. Nothing was suited to craning quite like a tortoise. "Finally run out of words to keep filling the books with, have they?" Not surprising, the way the philosophers went on.

"They call them pamphlets." The little books seemed to have only a handful of pages, if that. "All the rage in Ankh-Morpork, apparently."

"Yeah? So's syphilis," he said.

"It's the new approach to spreading the _Book of Om_," Brutha told him.

"I can see! Spread it much further and you'll have to start cutting the pages up smaller." Om, in common with most gods, generally preferred a bit of heft to his holy books, the better to give his proselytising worshippers a sense of authority, not to mention a handy weapon in a pinch.

"We don't conquer other countries with our armies any more, so the new priests talk about conquering them with ideas," he said.

"Good thinking. Much more dangerous." Om peered with renewed interest at the topmost pamphlet. It was called _Lighthouse_, and featured a careful drawing of one in the upper corner by someone who wasn't letting their complete lack of familiarity with the subject hold them back. "Bringing Thee Light of Om To Alle Three Dark Places," he read. "Which three are they, then?"

"I think it's supposed to say 'thee'," Brutha said, but a bit doubtfully. In his role as Cenobiarch he'd eventually learned to read and write, but he'd never be a natural. It wasn't so much that he had trouble telling the letters apart as he had trouble telling them together. Symbols other people claimed were both the same had brushstrokes drawn a hairsbreadth different.

Om perused the rest of the page, which argued with badly spelled enthusiasm that the way of Om was definitely superior to any other gods that the reader might have heard about.

Funny thing, really. He'd been dead set against allowing other gods into Omnia, of course - that business with the Quisition, very terrible, naturally, never to be repeated, et cetera, but since they already _had_ a country full of people who'd been taught to believe that Om was the one and only god...

And yet showing them that there were other gods out there didn't seem to dent their belief in the infallibility of Om at all. If anything, it only made it stronger. It turned out that what his nation of believers in a single unifying religion had really needed was some good old religious divisions to bolster their conviction that theirs was the better path. After all, it was no fun believing that you were living life in a righteous way if there was no one else doing it wrong that you could explain that to.

In fact, the Omnians had embraced the idea of religious disagreement with such enthusiasm they'd stopped waiting for other gods to get in on the act and started creating even more rifts by themselves. Every time he turned around there was some other new group announcing themselves as The Church of Believing in the Glory of Om and Also That the New Young Subdeacon Never Lights the Candles Properly, Not Like Back In Our Day.

And they all burned with powerful, fervent belief, the kind that buoyed a god aloft and carried him to every corner of the world. It was better than armies, better than riding out to trample infidels, because they kept trying to turn the infidels into _more_ believers. Not the worthless kind, the kind that only knelt because of the boot on their back, but the real thing.

A new way, eh? Maybe there was something to this idea of Brutha's of letting his followers squabble out the tenets of their new religion for themselves. It didn't matter that they were all pulling in different directions just as long as the resistance made them pull all the harder.

Still, a wise god knew it was a good idea to throw his weight around every so often, just to make sure nobody got any ideas about doing things _too_ much by themselves. Om considered his latest commandment with due care.

"Thou shalt give your god another melon slice."

And there was more melon. And it was good.


End file.
